Policies that have been effective in reducing gun crime and violence are higher rates of incarceration for repeat offenders, for longer terms, and concealed carry permits. Lott explains the latter, “But the point isn’t to help hunters. Semi-automatic weapons also protect people and save lives. Single-shot rifles that require you to physically reload the gun may not do people a lot of good when they are facing multiple criminals or when their first shot misses or fails to stop an attacker.”

In my recent column on this subject, I proposed a complete solution to the problem presented by the Newtown massacre based on paying teachers and school administrators with concealed carry permits a bonus for bringing their guns to school. The NRA tried to introduce similar logic to the debate in an ad pointing out that President Obama’s own daughters attend the private Sidwell Friends school in Washington DC, which employs 9 armed security guards.

This ad had nothing to do with secret service protection for the President’s kids. The ad is talking about armed guards the school has hired. The point is that armed guardians in schools (not Secret Service protection for every kid) are the answer. And this demonstrates that the President’s position is hypocritical, and, therefore, fallacious. But this iron logic was met with derision from today’s New Left Democrats and their party controlled media. Show me the critical response that did not just evade the logical argument rather than answer it.

Lott further explains the solution in the Journal,

“If we finally want to deal seriously with multiple victim public shootings, its time that we acknowledge a common feature of these attacks: With just a single exception, the attack in Tucson last year, every public shooting in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed since at least 1950 has occurred in a place where citizens are not allowed to carry their own firearms. Had some citizens been armed, they might have been able to stop the killings before the police got to the scene. In the Newtown attack, it took police 20 minutes to arrive at the school after the first calls for help.”

I apologize for so much naked logic in this commentary, and for the same by the sophisticated economist John Lott, and by the NRA. I know that offends people. That social problem, the decline and fall of Aristotelian logic among the general public, and among today’s New Left Democrats, is central to the decline of our democracy into “political failure,” analogous to market failure. See e.g. California, Illinois, New York.